The Crumblestones of Acquisition: Lack of Appropriate Tracking Systems (Part 6)

Where Visibility Fails, Frustration Flourishes

Serialized from Contracting for Rapid Acquisition: A Practical and Personal Guide to Disrupting the Status Quo for a More Responsive Future
By Lorna E. Tedder

We’ve all heard the saying: what gets measured gets managed. In federal acquisition, what we measure is narrow—and what we ignore is often where our real problems live.

Tracking systems are supposed to bring clarity: to help us understand how long something takes, where it’s stuck, and how resources are being used. In theory, they help us find patterns, correct course, and continuously improve. Unfortunately, too often, our systems fall short or don’t exist at all.

I’ve seen Program Managers build beautiful Gantt charts for the lifecycle of a capability…and yet somehow the part where the requirement gets into Contracting’s hands is a black hole. We measure PALT—Procurement Administrative Lead Time, though what the A in PALT stands for depends on where you work—as if that’s the whole story. It’s not. In many cases, it’s not even half the story, as we learned with the Requirements Crumblestone.

The Problem We Keep Overlooking—Where Tracking Begins and Ends

Let’s be clear: the time it takes to get on contract doesn’t start when the Contracting Officer opens the requirements package. It starts long before that—during market research, early planning, requirements drafting, and coordination with legal and finance. In fact, many packages spend months or even years in development before they land on the Contracting Officer’s desk.

But how often do we track that? If at all?

When You Can’t See the Big Picture

If you’re lucky, someone is keeping a spreadsheet. If you’re really lucky, it’s updated. If you’re really lucky, it’s not only accurate but also shared across teams.

Most of the time, though? The data doesn’t exist. Or the systems don’t talk to each other. Or they rely on manual updates from exhausted GS-14s logging on late at night just to figure out where their workload stands or creating their own spreadsheets to manage their workload.

And here’s where things fall apart.

A package may have been sitting in coordination for 16 months…and suddenly there’s a demand to get it awarded in two weeks. Sometimes the Contracting Officer is hearing about it for the first time. Worse, if they’d known about it even three months earlier, they might’ve folded it into a major IDIQ that just closed. But there’s no visibility into what’s coming, so planning is impossible.

The result? Last-minute scrambling. Duplicate work. Bottlenecks that could’ve been avoided. And of course—blame.

PALT vs ALT vs Delivery: The Illusion of Insight

To outsiders and end users, the important thing is how fast they can get a good solution, not how fast someone can develop a proper requirements package or how fast someone can award a contract. This is how most of us buy things in our personal lives: we have a need, we go get the solution and apply it that day. Amazon and other big companies have spoiled us with the convenience of same-day or next-day delivery. We don’t wait a year just to have a company start working on how to fix a problem for us and then years for them to figure out the fix. Compare that to buying for the Government.

It’s tempting to use PALT as a performance metric, but PALT only measures what happens after the requirements package is accepted by Contracting or how long it takes for a contractor to provide the solution. It doesn’t measure how long it took to get the package ready. It doesn’t measure how many times it was returned for correction. It doesn’t measure whether it arrived missing key documents or technical details. It certainly doesn’t tell you when the need was first identified.

That’s why we need to differentiate between PALT and ALT—Acquisition Lead Time. Because Acquisition includes everything from the moment someone says, “We need this,” through award and execution. That broader timeline is what really tells the story, not the middle of the story.

Until we start tracking both, we’ll never know where the true bottlenecks are. Is it the technical evaluation? The internal approval chain? The wait for a cost estimate? Or is it the Contracting shop, simply overwhelmed with last-minute fire drills and no advance warning?

If you don’t track it, you can’t know. And if you don’t know, you can’t fix it.

What We’re Not Tracking—and Should Be

Here are a few areas where tracking is often absent but critically needed:

• Time from requirement identification to package submission
• Number of returns for incomplete or incorrect packages
• Duration of technical evaluations
• Use of tools like Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs)—Are they working? Are they being used at all? Yes, they’re being mandated now in 2025, but mandating tools be used has not always been successful. I’ve seen contract types mandated that weren’t used for “reasons.” I’ve seen Other Transaction agreements be mandated but still ignored or turned into a “FARified” version that eliminated any goodness gained through an OT agreement. If CSOs are tracked, then we’ll know if they’re used and for what.
• Communication authorities—Who has them? How long do they take to approve?
• Workload transparency—How many actions is each Contracting Officer managing? Are we balancing assignments or burning people out?

We need more than just dashboards for dashboards’ sake. We need data that tells a story. Data that identifies friction points. Data that informs strategy.

Because right now? We’re often making decisions based on what’s visible—usually only the part where the Contracting Officer is in the hot seat.

How to Start Fixing It

No single system will solve this. But here’s how you can start:

• Track the full lifecycle, not just what happens inside Contracting.
• Standardize definitions. Make sure everyone is using the same terms for PALT, ALT, CSO, etc.
• Automate wisely. If you’re still using spreadsheets, look for light-touch tools that can integrate across platforms.
• Use AI tools where possible. Ideally, these tools will spot patterns an individual might not and can crunch that data quickly enough for an organization to make decisions in a timely manner. Granted, this might not be available for classified or sensitive data.
• Share data across silos. Contracting, Program Management, Finance, Legal—everyone needs access to the same picture.
• Measure where decisions are delayed—not just where they’re made. Oversight that adds no value is a delay, not a safeguard.

Above all: Use the data to make better decisions. Not to assign blame. Not to game the metrics, but to actually improve how we deliver.

No Gaming the System!

I’ve seen “fixes” before where either self-preservation or self-congratulations got in the way of understanding what was really going on. Also known as, “garbage in, garbage out.” Even with superb AI tools, they’re only as good as the data.

The argument over when the measuring period begins is nothing new. It’s been going on for decades. At one point in my career, Contracting Officers needed to show that they were moving fast, so they weren’t allowed to start their clock officially until they received the final funding document.

Under that policy, when I awarded the original GBU-28 Bunker Buster contract as a Contract Specialist (and soon after became a Contracting Officer), it took only five minutes. That’s what my official lead time said. How?

I stood in the hall with the contract, my Contracting Officer, and the contractor’s representative who signed the document he’d already read days before. I’d already done everything in draft, and all agreements had been made, contingent on receipt of funds. My contract folder had every piece of required documentation in it already, except for one—the funding document. I might have had that ten days earlier, but the person at the Pentagon who was to send us the funds kept an index-card tickler file and promised to send the money at the end of the month and not before. Fortunately, someone waited for her to be away from her desk and sent it before the end of the month. (Tip:  always find out when your road block is at lunch or on vacation.) Our financial manager ran the funding document to my office, and as they handed it to me, my Contracting Officer signed the contract. Voila! Five-minute lead time!

It actually took about two weeks from the time the requirement hit to the time I signed the contract. Had our official lead time told the real story, all the milestones would have told a story of where the delays were and where the heroics were. Instead, the milestones all started when I was handed the last thing I needed to make an award, so they were all the same date as the award. Magic!

That’s what I mean by gaming the system. This practice lasted a while at that particular installation. The Bunker Buster was an urgent action with an amazing team that constantly overcame glitches and barriers, but our lead time report didn’t show our herculean efforts. I saw various Program Offices use this “look how fast we are” policy we were under at the time, so contracts that took two years to award showed a three-month lead time.

The problem with gaming the system—and what caused the shift in when a package was accepted in my organization—wasn’t that it prevented seeing the bottlenecks but that it hurt staffing levels at a time when Government employees were being cut. My branch chiefs and division chief had a hard time justifying our personnel slots when we were getting three months’ workload credit for an actual two years of work. We also noticed that other organizations that weren’t gaming the system were better able to justify the need for full or near-full staffing.

The Hidden Impact of Not Knowing

Tracking has been, at best, inconsistent, and at worst, non-existent. If I’ve been surprised at the organizations that have multiple tracking systems to fill the gaps in the official tracking system, I’ve been shocked by the ones that don’t track at all or have a notebook in a desk drawer with information scrawled in both cursive and curses.

When systems fail to track what matters, good people burn out, smart plans get delayed, and the acquisition system loses credibility.

If we want to move faster, smarter, and more collaboratively, we have to build systems that show the full picture. Not just the part that’s convenient to measure, or that people record garbage data because they don’t understand why it matters.

Otherwise, we’re just rearranging the data points on a system we don’t fully understand and pretending we can manage what we’ve never actually measured.

We need consistent methods of tracking and good data. Right now, visibility is in the lower levels of leadership, if at all. Think about it: there’s not currently a button that the President or Secretary of Defense, for example, can push that will tell them where the problems are in all acquisition timelines, how long it takes to evaluate a proposal, how long it takes to get a contract through the review cycle, or where to focus effort on adding AI tools or rewriting laws and regulations that cause delays.

Bottom Line: Until we start tracking the full lifecycle—not just the part where Contracting is in the spotlight—we’ll keep mistaking symptoms for root causes. Visibility isn’t just about dashboards. It’s about accountability, foresight, and empowering every team to act sooner and smarter.

Next Up: Crumblestone #6 – Resource Constraints
Because even the best plans fall apart when your workforce is too overloaded to carry them out.